Poet DM Bradford

Friday, november 3
dm bradford

Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). Bradford is the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Awards, and Gerard Lampert Memorial Award. Bottom Rail on Top is their second book. 

Somewhere in the cut between Harriet Jacobs and surveillance, Southampton and sneaker game, Lake Providence and the supply chain, Bottom Rail on Top sets off a mediation between the complications of legacy and selfhood. In a kind of archives-powered unmooring of the linear progress story, award-winning poet D.M. Bradford fragments and recomposes American histories of antebellum Black life and emancipation, and stages the action in tandem with the matter of their own life.

”On the page, Bottom Rail on Top started with the curious Southern history of the phrase and the stories around it. But for my body and its connection to the antebellum settings I'd be thinking about, it began 45 minutes outside of New Orleans, and four years before I’d write anything, at a plantation. Everything I can’t forget about that time and place makes up the whole of the book’s opening sequence and prose piece, and took me into the rest of it.. “ - DM Bradford

Poet Joey Scarfone

november 3 poetic opener
joey scarfone

joey scarfone is a self proclaimed jaded dinosaur, hence the title of his second book of poetry and art. he contributes a column called Midnight Fiction to a magazine called fleasonthedog.com that comes out four times a year.

Poet Patrick Friesen

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10
PATRICK FRIESEN
Patrick Friesen is a Manitoban now living in Victoria who has published poetry, essays, co-translations with Per Brask, and stage and radio plays.  He has collaborated on two music/spoken word albums with Niko Friesen.  Most recently he published Reckoning with Anvil and recorded an album of spoken word.

“Reckoning is one long poem in search of itself, its own meaning.  A synecdoche of verse, the segments call and respond to each other, like jazz musicians riffing back and forth in a late-night speakeasy.  Snippets of conversation make it through the air, across the space that seems vast even in its closeness.  We are big, we are small, there is eternity in a birdcall. This is end times, yet beginnings surround us.  They are there in memory, in grief, in happiness and in song.”

Poetic Appetizer
from “For Your Head”

an old woman is walking in the heat, she is
not walking toward an oasis, they have all
dried out, she is looking for the last tree,
carrying the mind of the species to the end
of the earth.

november 10 poetic opener
eva kolacz

Eva Kolacz  has published three poetry collections and is a professional painter whose artworks are in private collections, the Ontario Archives, and National Museums of Poland.  She immigrated to Canada as a refugee in 1981, leaving Poland - then ruled by the Soviet  Union - because the voices of artists and writers were censored.

pep in the afternoon
Planet Earth Poetry, New Horizons - friday, November 17 2 pm

Join our featured readers on the third Friday of every month in the afternoon at New Horizons in James Bay (234 Menzies Street), in addition to our usual evening reading at Russell Books. See “An Homage to P.K. Page” event information below for details.

The poets reading are: Susan McCaslin/ Barbara Colebrook/ Peace Joan Roberts/ Kate Braid/ Sandy Shrieve and Heidi Greco/ Wendy Donawa/ Terry Anne Carter/ Margaret Slaven’s friend reading for her/Jane Bow.
Hosted by PEP with Yvonne Blomer and DC Reid.

friday, november 17
an homage to P.K. Page (no opener - no open mic)

Our feet barely touched the earth, and memory
erased at birth, but gradually reassembling
coalesced and formed a whole, as single birds
gathering for migration form a flock.

—P.K. Page, “Presences”

In Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page, Canadian poets honour the legacy of the internationally-acclaimed and influential poet, P.K. Page. Page, born Patricia Kathleen, earned numerous awards and accolades in her lifetime for her work as a poet and visual artist—she received the Governor General’s Award in 1954 for The Metal and the Flower, and the Canadian Authors Association Award in 1985 for The Glass Air; she was made both an Officer of the Order of Canada (1977) and a member of the Order of British Columbia (2003); in 2004, she was presented with the inaugural Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence. Today, her impact upon the Canadian poetic landscape is recognized throughout the country, and honoured by the annual P. K. Page Founders' Award for Poetry offered by The University of Victoria with The Malahat Review.

Edited by Yvonne Blomer and DC Reid, and featuring pieces from renowned poets including John Barton, Marilyn Bowering, Lorna Crozier, Eve Joseph, Patrick Lane, Alice Major, kjmunro, Patricia Young, and many others, Hologram is testament to the mentoring that P.K. Page offered through community and conversation, as a living writer and through her poetry. As Solveig Adair writes in her brief story about P.K. Page, “I want to have a conversation with P.K. Page, but I’ve gradually realized that I’ve been having that conversation, year over year…”
Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page is an insightful poetic conversation that honours one of Canada’s most influential poets. It promises to inspire past and future generations of writers, thinkers, and poetry-lovers.

Readers are: Lynne Mustard/Barbara Pelman/ Susan McCaslin/Dan MacIsaac/Kate Braid/Sandy Shreve and Heidi Greco/Cynthia Woodman Kerkham/Stephen T. Berg/Wendy Donawa/ Terry Ann Carter/Leila Kulpas

Poet Barbara Pelman

friday, november 24
poet barbara pelman

Barbara Pelman has an MA in Literature from the University of Toronto, and lives in Victoria, BC. She has taught high school and university English courses for three decades and is now retired. She has three previous books of poetry: One Stone (Ekstasis Editions, 2005), Borrowed Rooms (Ronsdale Press, 2008) and Narrow Bridge (Ronsdale Press, 2017), and a chapbook Aubade Amalfi (Rubicon Press, 2016). She is an active member of Victoria’s vibrant poetry community, assisting at Planet Earth Poetry and conducting workshops. She is also a frequent traveller to Vancouver to visit her mother, and her daughter and grandson. Her new book, A Brief and Endless Sea, was released in October 2023 by Caitlin Press.

These poems vibrate with unexpected shifts and precise, startling imagery, the touchstones of a poet whose work critics have described as “thrilling,” “emotionally evocative,” and “revelatory.”

Poetic Appetizer
from “Wild a Little While”

And the sun rose and fell,
somewhere else. It was day,
it was night. We ate on the bed,
or did we eat anything at all?
I can’t remember, just know
we watched stars from the porthole,
that attic ship that sailed
in a brief and endless sea.

Poet Karen Enns

november 24 poetic opener
karen enns

Karen Enns is the author of four books of poetry: Dislocations, published in March, 2023, Cloud Physics, winner of the Raymond Souster Award, Ordinary Hours, and That Other Beauty. Her poems have appeared in many Canadian literary journals including The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and Grain Magazine. She lives in Central Saanich.